


siúil, a rún: red is the rose

by Kells



Series: siúil, a rún: the Cold War AAU [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Bucky Barnes Feels, Cold War, Double Agents, F/M, Female Steve Rogers, Memory Alteration, Misunderstandings, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-03 21:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1757581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kells/pseuds/Kells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha gets her own prequel! It's less manic than Clint's take because it's tough being a Soviet spy-in-training whose only source of stability doesn't completely remember who he is. She'll catch us up with some KGB backstory, and then we'll be all set for S+J to do their thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tasha meets Captain Kolchak; he is not quite what she expected.

“Romanova. What’s the matter?”

Natalia scrambled to her feet, wondering how she had ever been careless enough to fall apart within walking distance of headquarters. She hadn’t realized Yakov Kolchak knew her by sight, let alone by name. She met his eyes and gave the answer they both knew was expected.

“Nothing, Comrade. Thank you for asking. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

Instead of accepting this and letting Natalia off the way any of her trainers would have done, the Winter Soldier rolled his eyes at her like a frustrated teenager.

“I know your instructors never stop reminding you that I’m not from around here, but I do realise that bawling on the steps of historical buildings isn’t normal in the capital.”

“The smog-”

“Please don’t insult us both.”

Aleksander Lukin's hitman of choice dropped easily onto the ledge where she had been perched and stretched his long legs out as casually as if he had been joining a friend for a much-needed smoke. As she sat back down, Natalia reached into her coat and offered him a cigarette mechanically. The Soldier shook his head with the briefest flicker of a smile.

“Thanks. I don’t smoke.”

This time it was Natalia who was unconvinced. It was Moscow: everyone smoked.

“I suppose you don’t drink either.”

“No, I definitely drink.”

They sat together in the silence for a minute, then Kolchak raised an eyebrow to show Natalia he was still waiting for an answer. His gaze was penetrating but also patient, somehow.

“How can I help if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?”

It had been years since anyone had looked at Natalia with real concern. She answered with her eyes on the ground, scuffing one dark boot against the slush-coated pavement.

“General Karpov wants to marry me. Apparently it must happen in the spring. I tried to-”

She broke off when Kolchak laughed unexpectedly- it was a hollow, bitter sound much closer to what Natalia would have imagined of the Winter Soldier than anything she had seen so far.

“Sometimes I think the bureau has to meet some kind of avoidable-wretchedness quota. There is no other explanation for some of their decisions.”

He rose briskly, going from lounging to parade rest in no time at all.

“Come with me. It might help if you can look less like you’ve been crying your eyes out, but I wouldn't worry.”

She didn't take the hand he offered, but followed without asking where they were going. Not twenty minutes later, they were standing in front of The chief of their bureau, Natalia trying to look like she had anywhere near the required level of security clearance while the Winter Soldier made her case with frustrated fluency. Of course she was a beauty, he growled as soon as Lukin opened his mouth- but there were scores of pretty girls in the ballet corps. _This_ girl was fast, disciplined, stronger than a number of the men in her cohort- as a tactician by training Kolchak felt it was only his duty to point out what a tragic waste of available resources it would be to “sell the girl to the highest bidder.”

By the time he was done, Lukin was glancing curiously between her and the soldier.

“I had no idea you and Comrade Romanova knew each other.”

Natalia had had no idea either, so she kept her face neutral and her eyes on Captain Kolchak, who shrugged as if to say he had no interest in what anyone thought they knew about him.

“I was at the selection trials. She was the best by far- you know it’s only that ass Vigand and his wounded pride that keep the Committee from recognizing it.”

Natalia had taken one of Lukin’s top men down in fourteen minutes, guaranteeing her place in the department but also earning the ire of the man in question and his unfortunately numerous followers.

“If you’re determined to waste the girl on party diplomacy at least send her to Beijing or Havana. Let Karpov have Belova or Petrovna if you really must secure your budget by sacrificing our women- either of those two would at least get some joy out of being some old pervert’s trophy.”

Natalia fought back shocked laughter.

“I am not interested in whether they will enjoy it,” Lukin snapped. “How would _you_ tell Wassily Karpov that a teenage ballerina of no bloody account is turning him down because she has other plans?”

There was a momentary pause as they considered how completely that was not an option, then the Winter Soldier surprised Natalia yet again. Without warning- without even looking at her- he put an arm around her waist and pulled her gently towards him.

“You could tell him that damn rascal Kolchak got there first.”

Lukin looked startled: it was a little bit insane, and quite likely dangerous for all of them, but strategically it was unrealistically neat. The Soviet Union professed to be well past issues of class and hierarchy, but tradition was tradition, especially within the army- no general would make a woman his wife if he thought people knew she had already been with a mere captain. It wasn't just a matter of rank- there were real implications for personal and political security, and that was without accounting for whether Karpov's ego would allow him to wonder how he would score as a lover in direct competition with Yakov Kolchak.

“He could have you sent back to Siberia, boy.”

Natalia didn't think the general was that invested- they had never actually met in person, so she would have guessed that he was more likely to make an alternative selection than respond aggressively- but Kolchak approached the question from another angle.

“He could,” he conceded, releasing his hold on Natalia so he could lean against the chair in front of Lukin’s desk as casually as if it were his own office.

“But if he does that you’ll have no insurance in the field, which means he’ll have none in the Kremlin, and then what will you two do? Send Vigand prancing in and hope there are no 19-year-old ballerinas in America?”

“Arrogance,” Lukin hissed, but he was smiling. “But such soundly reasoned arrogance.”

Captain Kolchak offered Natalia an encouraging smirk, if there could be such a thing. She answered with a tentative smile- surely it couldn’t be this easy? Less than an hour earlier she had been facing the absolute and permanent end to her independence, to say nothing of her plans or hopes.

“You’re not bedding the girl,” General Lukin observed. It wasn’t a question, but the Soldier shook his head anyway.

“And you don’t want to.”

“We have never spoken before today. I wouldn't ask Comrade Romanova to trade down in the sphere of unsolicited attention from older men she wants nothing to do with.”

Natalia would not have called it _trading_ _down_ to exchange a vain, self-centred bureaucrat in his 50s for the handsome younger man who was going to all this trouble for the sake of a stranger, but it was still a relief to have her instincts about the captain’s motives confirmed. She shook her head, taking the captain's lead; Kolchak nodded agreeably but Lukin smirked at her as if he realised she wasn't saying she wouldn't have contemplated the offer if one had been made. He turned back to the Winter Soldier eagerly.

“Then you mean to train her, Yakov?”

Everyone knew how much Lukin wanted Captain Kolchak to take on a student or twenty- rumours abounded as to why the Winter Soldier had never yet acquiesced, and why Lukin saw fit to tolerate his reluctance instead of issuing a direct order as he had often done before, and over much more controversial things.

“I have no objection. It would justify closer interaction- everything else will be more believable.”

Suddenly they were both looking at her expectantly: incredibly, given how Natalia’s afternoon had gone, it seemed she now had the final say in how her immediate future would unfold.

“It would be an honour.”

It was the expected answer again, but this time it was also the truth. The Winter Soldier scowled.

“Yes, and becoming Mrs. Karpov would be a greater honour. The question is: do you want this honour? It's a separate question, you understand, not a condition of avoiding that lout.”

Natalia smiled.

“I would like it very much, and not only to avoid that lout.”

Lukin laughed shortly.

“At least we know she can handle your damn lip. Fine, your point is well made- I suppose we all win, except poor old Karpov. I'll break the news the next time he is in the capital.”

Natalia thought Lukin looked quite affectionate for a moment.

“I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it while we decide how to keep you out of the country until “the old pervert” gets over his disappointment. Now get out of my office, boy- unless you have more ways to ruin my evening up your sleeve.”

The Soldier offered his superior a salute that was so carefully correct as to be deeply mocking, then turned for the door with a grin. Natalia followed quickly after a brief salute of her own.

“You should have a drink with me tonight,” Kolchak decided as they made their way towards the apartments no one with any sense thought of as home.

“This whole thing will go over better if we let the others see us together more than once before we start working together.”

It made sense, so Natalia nodded. She had only hesitated for a second, mostly wondering why he would go to this much trouble on the account of a near stranger, but the captain had been paying close attention.

“You don’t have a boy waiting for you somewhere around the corner, do you?”

She shook her head; he nodded. Something about the Soldier's pensive expression made Natalia push for more.

“Would you have told me to stop seeing him?”

Kolchak shook his head slowly.

“I'd have said you should both be much more careful from now on. The more you have that’s really yours, the more they can take away when you cross them, and we're already taking deliberate steps that way.”

She couldn’t help noticing that he said ‘when’ instead of ‘if.’

“Is that something Comrade Lukin says?”

“I do have some thoughts of my own,” the Soldier muttered. Natalia started guiltily, but he didn't reprimand her, so she took a breath and asked the question that had been weighing on her since Kolchak had first offered her his hand.

“Can I ask you why you’d do this? It’s not that I’m not grateful- of course not!- but…you hardly know me, Captain.”

He had said that himself, so Natalia hoped he would not be offended. Kolchak said nothing for some time; they pressed on in the ashy darkness without speaking.

“Several reasons. One- you were sobbing alone in the street. Two- I'll take any chance I can get to undermine that idiot Vigand. Three- I know Wassily Karpov, and I would hate to see anyone who shows the least potential in anything saddled with that man for life.”

Natalia opened her mouth and shut it without saying anything. Kolchak grinned, not denying what she’d realized he had been implying about her colleagues, but then his voice gentled and his gaze turned introspective.

“And there was a girl I grew up with- Anya, who was the brightest star in the sky. Lit up every room she entered.”

This, Natalia realized at once, was why Lukin had been so sure Kolchak had no interest in her except professionally. From the dark look he seemed to be fighting she thought it might also be the reason Lukin had never pushed him harder on the subject of mentoring. And he had sounded so bitter just then, about being careful-

“They didn’t have her killed?”

He shook his head again.

“Small mercies. No, it was just a crash. We went up together- god alone knows how even one of us survived.”

It was common knowledge that Kolchak had been a test pilot before Lukin had found him and brought him to Moscow- hence 'Captain' even though he outranked many of Natasha's instructors.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. It was experimental aeronautics- we knew the risks. And I think, sometimes- I can’t be sorry she got to live the life she chose for herself.”

“Thank you," Natalia said quietly. “Really, Captain, _thank you._ ”

It wasn’t enough- she had no idea what would have been enough- but Natalia meant it with all her heart and maybe more than that. Her newfound protector smiled distantly.

“It's gladly done, Natalia.” 

He held the door for her, an unusual gesture in the city, then stepped through with one last grimace at the unforgiving cold. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger and marginally brighter.

“I hope you don’t mind- I don’t think we can call each other ‘Comrade’ while we’re meant to be-”

“Bedding each other?”

Kolchak looked about as appalled as amused.

“If you like. Wait, that’s not what I mean. That is, if you- just- call me Yakov, all right?”

Natalia found it quite endearing to watch the Winter Soldier, who must haunt the dreams of many a grown man once they had crossed Aleksander Lukin, flushed and fumbling at his own unintentional double-entendre. She took his arm.

“I think I’d like it if you called me Tasha, then.”

His expression grew less strained. 

“Tasha and Yasha -it’s like it was written in the stars. Aren’t you glad that even in Kemerovo we know that Moscow girls can’t be brought down by _smog_?”  

She laughed and leaned in a little as he led her towards the bar. It wasn’t the laugh of a girl in love- much more the dizzy gasp of a convict pardoned with the noose already around her neck- but it must have looked close enough, because they were attracting inquisitive looks long before the captain came back with their drinks.

“Smile for your public,” Kolchak murmured so only Natasha could hear him, then touched his glass to hers before half the bar watched them down their first shot. She grinned at him, beginning to feel like herself again for the first time since Karpov's office had pulled the rug out from under her that afternoon.

“You know I train with the Bolshoi, don't you? All we really learned, the whole first year, was how to smile through crippling pain.”

“I’d like to learn that,” he remarked contemplatively. Natasha wasn't completely sure he was joking, but before she could say anything she caught sight of the infamous Vigand, already working his way towards them with a reptilian kind of excitement plain on his face. She glanced at her new trainer significantly, then spoke just a little above the necessary volume.

“Captain Kolchak, I'm sure _you_ don’t need anyone to teach you the right moves.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maria Stevens is on the scene (but Tasha isn't); it goes well for no one. also, Lukin asks a favour Tasha's not sure about.

Natasha had known Captain Kolchak wanted to be at her last performance of the season, but given where he was supposed to be coming from she wasn’t completely sure he’d made it until she found him waiting for her at the stage door with a small bouquet of exquisite pink roses and a warm, approving look that meant much more than flowers ever could.

“Why are you out here? You must be freezing.”

“Please, March in Moscow is like July in Kemerovo. Did you think I was going to wait in _there_?”

Natasha shook her head with a fond smile. If she asked him, Yasha would come to any event- try-out, lunchtime rehearsal, opening night. His enthusiasm and encouragement wrote real, but he never, ever, showed the least interest in seeing or being seen by the Bolshoi regulars. How exactly he managed to keep such a low profile that she couldn’t pick him out in the audience even when she spent half her time onstage scanning the audience for his white-blonde hair and startling grey eyes was a mystery, but Natasha tried not to take it personally. If there was one man in Moscow who knew how to disappear in plain sight, she thought it must be Yasha Kolchak.

She accepted the flowers he held out to her, breathing in their fragrance with delight.

“It's early for roses, isn't it?”

“I’m the Winter Soldier,” he reminded her scornfully. “The elements bend to my will.”

She had to laugh at that- it was so typical of the oddly enigmatic, surprisingly gentle young man who had become her closest companion in a matter of months. On duty, especially in front of Lukin’s clutch of favourites, Captain Kolchak wore the casual arrogance that went along with his rank and reputation as naturally as if it were his natural state, but Natasha had very quickly discovered that she had much more time for the wry self-deprecation and gentle teasing that marked Yasha on his own time. She bumped his hip with hers as she took his arm, tilting her head automatically so he could kiss her cheek in greeting as he often did.

“If you spoil me like this now, what are you going to do when they make me prima ballerina?”

They both knew she was only teasing- Aleksander Lukin would see to it that Tasha was cleared for active duty long before she earned any kind of principal role at the ballet- but Yasha smiled broadly. He would build her a palace out of ice, he declared, and fill it full of sunflowers even in the dead of winter.

“I’ll hold you do that. Did you get to use your elemental gifts in London?”

He had not; he hadn’t even had a chance to use his rifle. His mission had been reconnaisance- yet another opportunity to watch the American agent Lukin had decided was Yasha’s long-term target. They had gone head-to-head once or twice, but of late Yasha had been despatched to watch Maria Stevens work and glean what he could from the experience. He hadn’t really reached any new conclusions: the woman was still unbelievably fast, unfailingly accurate, and-

“Extremely beautiful and shockingly glamorous, with a voice like all the choirs of Heaven singing in chorus?”

He stared at her in undisguised astonishment; Natasha laughed and squeezed his arm.

“I’m sorry. It’s just- the way you talk about that woman, sometimes I think you like her much more than Lukin would consider appropriate.”

“She’s streets ahead of their other agents,” he grinned, making no comment on Natasha’s evaluation of his opinion.

“It makes my very tedious work more interesting.”

“It makes your very routine work more dangerous,” Tasha corrected him sternly. Unconsciously, she closed her hand over the spot on his forearm where a newish scar was slowly silvering. None of the other Americans had ever come so close to really hurting him.

Yasha waved her off as if getting shot was the same kind of minor inconvenience as missing a train or coming home to find your cupboards bare except for stale bread and dried peas.

“That was supposed to be a headshot. As a sniper even she would tell you that means I won that round.”

Natasha said nothing; she had enough trouble accepting the fact that people regularly tried to shoot her best friend and protector in the head even without being entirely blasé about the fact that some of them had come closer than others to succeeding, or that the woman at whom Lukin seemed determined to thrust him as often as possible was the most capable of doing him real damage. She kept her mouth shut, but Yasha saw her consternation and smiled again, wholly sympathetic.

“It’s all right, you know. We all get on that train someday.”

“Of course,” Natasha allowed, trying not to think of the wife he’d lost too early, and whose absence even she felt every day.

“But your ticket is for much, much later, and I won’t have some American bitch with a rifle from the war go changing your travel plans before I’m ready to let you go. I don’t care how _interesting_ you think she is; it’s not going to be her decision.”

“No, apparently it’s yours.”

“Yes,” Natasha said firmly, lifting her chin by way of daring him to correct her. “It is.”

“Most of the time she prefers pistols,” Yasha told her helpfully.

“Two of them. It’s a beautiful thing to see, when she’s on form.”

“I hope she’s never, ever, on form when you’re there to see her.”

Tasha caught the captain’s free hand as he raised it to rub obsessively at his right eye the way he only did when he was in a lot of pain.

“Have you told Aleksander they’re getting worse again?”

His headaches came and went without any discernible pattern- sometimes he was only mildly disturbed for a matter of hours, but on one or two occasions he had been incapacitated for days on end. When that happened, Lukin kept him out of sight in some recovery room so no one but his handler knew how Yasha Kolchak dealt with severe pain and, Natasha strongly suspected, the lasting trauma of both injury and loss. She had never asked outright whether his headaches were a direct result of the crash that had killed his wife, but she had noticed that Yasha tended to talk about Anya Kolchak more in the days leading up to some of his more violent episodes, and that he tended to avoid the topic immediately afterwards. For her own part, Natasha found it helped both of them if she expended her nervous energy on making tea, offering Yasha neck rubs he always refused, and nagging him until he went to Lukin for whatever treatment it was that actually worked.

“I’ll speak to him after I’ve seen you home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll go now. I know how to walk home on my own, Yasha.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“I know. I want to. We’re doing this together, remember?”

He used that line on her so often it sometimes felt like a party slogan- when he demanded that she allow him to ice the ankle she'd twisted by over-exerting herself without stretching properly, when Vigand had started saying very pointed things about the appropriateness of their relationship, and once even as justification for doing her last three shots for her because he’d decided she had had enough that night.

Yasha smiled, knowing he was ensnared in a trap of his own making, and let Natasha lead them in a slightly different direction. Lukin met them at the door himself, which was unusual- maybe he had been expecting a visit, Natasha thought, and wondered if she should have let Yasha come on his own after all. The general’s curiosity faded into comprehension as Lukin took in the captain’s drawn expression.

“Thank you, Natalia. I’ll see to him from here.”

Tasha fought the urge to protest, nodding sharply the way Captain Kolchak always did and allowing Lukin’s aide to see her to the door as their superior led Yasha down the hallway, already speaking to him in a low, soothing voice.

She didn’t see him for several days, but when he finally showed up again, swaggering onto the training field as if he owned the place, he was confident, energised, and even more breathtakingly efficient than usual as he put the recruits through their paces. Six months ago, no one would have guessed that Yasha Kolchak would be giving mass demonstrations to the youngest members of their force, but it had been a surprisingly quick trip from his one-on-one sessions with Natasha to small-group classes and then these enormous sessions that appeared to warm the very cockles of Aleksander Lukin’s heart. There were the usual murmurs about Kolchak, conditioning, and Lukin’s misuse of controlled substances, but since Yasha seemed content to ignore them with a bored kind of smirk Natasha chose to roll her eyes and do the same.

Spring passed very quietly, for them. Yasha was called away on various trips, not all of which he could talk about- and fewer of which he would have wanted to even if he could. Tasha tried to be there for him when she thought he wanted company, but she already knew that for all the captain was an affectionate man by nature he preferred to nurse his deeper wounds in solitude. She passed two more tests, and was told she would be ready for fieldwork by the end of the year. Yasha said nothing at all about whether he would be asking for her to be deployed with him, and Natasha knew better than to push the point. She would earn it, she decided, and when everyone could see that she was the only one who deserved to go out at his side then no one- no bitter Vigand or jealous Karpov or high-minded Captain Kolchak with his misplaced ideas about protecting her- would have any grounds on which to deny her right to be there.

* * *

Natasha, in pursuit of that happy mid-term goal, had just completed her first round of physical training and was already anticipating Yasha's sardonic satisfaction at how it had gone when she caught the second half what his rival was saying to comfort the idiot she’d taken down in a fraction of the time she’d taken to best Vigand himself a full year earlier.

“-hardly matters. Little bitch won’t be so brave without Kolchak to protect her. I’m surprised she’s not sobbing over his corpse already.”

“Maybe they haven’t told her,” the student suggested. He wasn’t trying anywhere as hard as his trainer to keep his voice down.

“You know what Lukin is like with his pet.”

Because she trained with the Winter Soldier, Natasha Romanova gathered her possessions with all the grace and poise of a Bolshoi chorus girl, and walked across the gymnasium in the same measured steps she always took.

Once she was in the street, though, all bets were off. She reached Lukin’s semi-secret home office in far less time than it had ever taken her to get there before, but of course the general’s aide was honour-bound to refuse entry to all without an appointment. Natasha reminded him that she was Yasha Kolchak’s fiancee, which was true in that everyone knew they were all but living together and untrue in that he’d never said one word about marrying her. She was just at the point of wondering whether it would be worth the trouble she would be bringing on herself to demand entry at knifepoint when a door opened in the hallway.

“Natalia? What brings you here?”

They really had not meant to tell her. She hoped beyond hope that Yasha was sitting in Lukin’s office with his boots on the mahogany desk, and that they would all be laughing at that idiot Leonid Vigand as soon as he heard what had brought her over with her heart in her mouth.

“Comrade Vigand thinks Captain Kolchak is dying. I thought, if that were true-”

She trailed off, willing Lukin to dismiss the idea out of hand. Instead, the general shook his head regretfully.

“It was a damn near thing. Come; you may as well see him since you’re here.”

When she did, Natasha almost wished Lukin had sent her away. She had seen Yasha in high spirits as well as low- exhausted, excited, affectionate, enraged. She had never seen him pale and still, breathing like it hurt him. It was a shoulder wound, clean but not pleasant. He’d lost a lot of blood, and would be in pain for much too long. He could have died, Natasha heard over everything the general said. He could still die. He’s just a man, for all everyone talks about him like he’s some kind of mythic hero.

Lukin must have seen the shock on her face, because he patted her hand with the awkward kindness of a military man plainly unused to young women.

“He will recover. Sooner than makes any sense, if I know the boy at all.”

She nodded, longing to take his hand but unsure whether it would hurt him.

“Was it that woman? Maria Stevens?”

“What do you know about Maria Stevens?”

There was a dangerous edge to General Lukin’s voice; too late, Natasha realised that Yasha probably disregarded at least as many rules as he followed in terms of what he was and was not allowed to tell her.

“She is American. She’s very fast, and he says that unless she is distracted she does not miss. He respects her.”

“Not enough,” Lukin muttered. There was a hint of anger there, and Natasha glanced up to see if she would have to defend her partner.

“Even the Americans are surprised she almost did it.”

The best explanation Stevens herself could come up with, he said grimly, was that Captain Kolchak had been so intent on his own target that he had failed to realise how much more quickly than his own rifle the American’s Colt would reload. It was hardly satisfactory- what little the Winter Soldier lacked in practical experience he had long since made up for in voracious reading- the man knew his arms and armaments.

“What do you think it was?”

Lukin scoffed.

“I am not as interested in _why_ as in making damn sure it does not happen again. If it hadn’t been for the headwind at those heights she would have killed him.”

The truth of it hung between them in the silence of the sick-room. Natasha decided she had to touch one of his too-still hands before she started to go crazy, and very carefully reached for the one that could not possibly do any damage to his wounded arm.

“It’s almost lucky his injuries are so extensive. The last time one of my men made so obvious an error of judgment Karpov had him shot for a spy.”

Natasha gasped, cheeks flushing as she glared at the general.

“Captain Kolchak would never-”

He cut her off, impatient.

“I know that and you know that. Do you think Karpov cares whether anyone thinks it’s true if it will allow him to get rid of someone he truly dislikes?”

Natasha shook her head, at a loss. Her glare had not dimmed.

“You knew this when you let him declare himself the man’s enemy?”

“He knew it too, my dear. It is our business to know how men like Wassily work.”

There was very little she could say to that, so Natasha said nothing. Overwhelmed anew by what the captain had taken on when he had stepped off that wintry pavement and changed her life for good, she bent over the hand she held in both of hers  and pressed her lips quite reverently to his palm.

“Comrade Romanova, may I speak freely?”

Having just kissed Lukin’s best officer’s hand as though he were a sleeping prince, Tasha was hardly in a position to demand that anyone else stand on ceremony.

“Of course, General.”

“Yasha is a good boy, I think we both know that. Very loyal, and very- principled, shall I say?”

She nodded, wondering what Lukin had to say that would prompt such a disclaimer before he got into it.

“That accident was a real tragedy. You are aware of the...episodes?”

She was, insofar as she knew about the headaches, and that he went to Lukin when they were more than he could handle. The general smiled, and Natasha had the strongest feeling she would not like what was coming next.

“It would be a great help to me- and to Yasha, of course- if you would agree to keep an eye on him.”

Natasha tried to be fair to Aleksander- she knew Yasha respected the general, and after all he had done a great deal to help her almost entirely because his protégé had requested it. But it just sounded so- tawdry, somehow. She imagined what Yasha would say if someone asked him to spy on her for a superior, and almost giggled at the thought of how quickly the Winter Soldier would have been out of the room. But she was not the Winter Soldier- she was just Comrade Romanova, the girl who was most interesting to the Kremlin as the one for whom the Winter Soldier had been prepared to take on General Karpov. There was something else, as well- if she said no, Lukin would not only blacklist her immediately but also see to it that someone else watched them both. That was no kind of solution for anyone to have to live with.

“What would you like me to do?”

“Just come to me, my dear, if he says anything that strikes you as…unorthodox. Anything at all, you understand- there are no false alarms. The more I know, the better I can protect him.”

She nodded, telling herself she had no other choice, and Lukin patted her hand again. This time, she thought, it felt both surer and more proprietary. She was fairly certain the slime was her imagination.

“Did you ever meet her? His wife, I mean.”

She could not have said why she wanted to know that, right then, but suddenly she did. Perhaps she wished the woman could be there to hold her husband’s hand.

“Precious Stefaniya? No.”

Natasha eyed the general sharply from under her lashes, but he did not seem to be mocking either Yasha or the memory of his wife. It was entirely possible that the captain really did call his wife that, sometimes- with Tasha he called her Anya more often than not, but he also called her ‘my bright star’ like it was just part of her name.

“I had hoped to bring them in together, but by the time we made our move it was too late.”

“He misses her so much.”

“Perhaps this is better for both of them." 

Natasha honestly could not imagine how that could be the case, and her face must have said so. The general tried to make her understand, and as he did Tasha caught her first glimpse of that gleam of fanaticism which Yasha insisted was discernible in every Russian officer of more than middling rank. She fought to keep her expression neutral as Lukin went on.

“His legacy will be her lasting memorial. If she had lived he would certainly have chosen long life and an easy death; in avenging her he will become a legend.”

Tasha chose not to ask how Lukin imagined Yasha could take revenge for an accident of engineering.

“You think he is like Achilles?”

“Would you not say so?”

Achilles, from what little Tasha knew, had spent most of his short, heroic life chafing under the leadership of vain and cruel men.

“Perhaps. I will do what I can.”

* * *

In spite of her misgivings, Natasha's cooperation did guarantee the general’s goodwill: she found herself with official permission to spend all her free moments waiting for Yasha to be well enough to talk to her properly. When it finally happened, though, it didn't start out with the joyful reunion she had been hoping for. Natasha had been reading in silence, occasionally patting the captain’s hand to prove that she knew he was still there, even if he did insist on recovering from massive blood loss by sleeping all day. She looked up in alarm when he went rigid, choking on a gasp that sounded more terrified than pained. Natasha realised with a terrible kind of pity that he was dreaming.

 “Yasha! Yasha, wake up. It’s all right- you’re home now."

He had his arms around her before she could wonder at how he'd gone from fast asleep to upright in bed in the space of a second.

“Stefaniya,” he murmured into her hair. “Anya moya-”

“No,” Tasha murmured, holding him close anyway because he had never let her close enough to offer this kind of comfort before and she couldn't be at all sure that he would allow it again. Feeling very bold, she ran one hand carefully through his hair.

“I’m sorry. It’s just me. Natalia.”

He went very still, then pulled back to study her face. His eyes were clear, and this time she knew he knew her.

“Tasha.”

“Yes. Hello.”

He smiled, but not quickly enough to mask the moment of pure desolation that had come between recognition and the memory of how much he liked Natasha in her own not-Anya capacity.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, avoiding her eyes. 

“Sometimes I get…confused.”

He looked so lost, and so alone, that for a brief and confusing moment Natasha was sure she would have married Wassily Karpov without a second thought if it meant Yasha Kolchak could have the life he deserved instead of the one they shared.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. When he did his best to smile, Natasha climbed carefully into bed with her partner, laughing off his raised eyebrow and breathing out in both contentment and relief when he put his good arm around her instead of objecting to her sudden, uninvited closeness. After a moment, she realised he was still watching her out of the corner of his eye. His expression was very grave.

“What is it?”

“I should let you go, you know. Karpov is well pleased with that new girl of his- you shouldn’t have to put up with this indefinitely.”

“Of course I should! What on earth would I do if I didn't have to put up with you?”

It didn’t come out quite as joking as Natasha had intended it. Yasha shrugged slightly.

“You could go out and find the boy who will treasure you like you deserve.”

It was sweet, in a weird yet weirdly fitting way, that the Winter Soldier still believed so deeply in romance- but Tasha Romanova had already been emphatically reminded of how much she was not and would never be the Winter Soldier.

“That _boy_ can go hang,” she snarled as though she knew who Yasha meant and found him utterly despicable.

“Yasha Kolchak, I would shoot him in the head if it would save your life.”

The captain was immobile with surprise for a moment, but then his expression gentled into the soft look he only ever gave her.

“You won’t say that once you’ve met him, you know. I hope his name is Pavel. Tasha and Pasha with baby Yasha- because you’re going to name one of your children after me, I mean.”

She glared, but she was already fighting a smile so it couldn’t have been very impressive.

“Shut up. Are you delirious?”

He shook his head as though he thought it had been a serious question.

“Just glad you’re here, Natashen’ka.”

“Yasha,” she said quietly, “I’m so, so glad you’re all right.”

“Aw, I wouldn’t just leave you on your own out here, sweetheart.”

“I love you,” Natasha thought, but wasn’t sure she could say out loud- she didn’t mean it _that_ way, and she wasn't convinced he was ready to hear it in any way at all. She rested her head on his shoulder, sighing quietly. When ten minutes passed without either of them moving, Yasha shook his head and reached for the deck of cards on his nightstand as soon as Tasha darted away so he'd have room to move. She went for the vodka he had already told her Lukin kept stashed in the bookcase.

“You’re not having any,” she warned him as she took her position across from him, tucking her feet under his blankets.

“I don’t want to know how alcohol mixes with whatever it is they’ve been pouring down your throat.”

“Slave-driver,” he grumbled, but smiled as he dealt their first hand one-handed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> first assignment post-injury is longer than expected and more traumatic than it looks; Tasha watches and worries and wonders about loyalty and who gets to demand it.

After almost four months of going to sleep secure in the knowledge that her trainer was safe in the next room, Tasha found it more nerve-wracking than she remembered to watch Yasha getting ready for one of his long solo trips.

“I’ll see you soon. Be careful, little wolf.”

He had taken to calling her that after one of Tasha’s fellow trainees had expressed his disappointment at being outclassed by calling her ‘a she-wolf from hell.’ It had started as a kind of defiant affirmation, but then Yasha had decided he liked it and refused to give it up. Since Tasha quite liked it herself, she had done nothing to dissuade him. She handed him the switch-knife he’d been cleaning in the kitchen and watched him tuck it into his belt.

“I’m just doing drills and taking tests. You’re the one who’s being released into the world outside this prison for the first time in forty years or whatever it is by now- three centuries? Six?”

The captain grinned- even he knew he had been whining outrageously towards the end of his long convalescence- but he answered the worry behind Natasha's jibe.

“I’ll be fine, Tashen’ka. It’s not even a real job, for heaven’s sake.”

She knew what that meant- to Yasha's great frustration, his assignment was, once again, just to wait and watch. He’d be gone a week, he told her; two at most. Privately, Tasha thought Lukin would have preferred to keep his top marksman in recovery for longer, but the Americans' decision to send their specialist behind the Iron Curtain was as close as it came to a personalized invitation for Captain Kolchak. When he asked if she wanted anything from Bucharest, Tasha had a very specific request.

“Please don't get shot again.”

He promised to do his best, just for her, and then Natasha was alone in the apartment that was rapidly becoming more familiar than her own quarters. Reminding herself that two weeks was hardly any time at all, she resolved to reorganise everything Yasha owned before he came back so he’d know what she thought of his leaving in the first place. Or, more correctly, so he’d see the value of taking her with him the next time- she’d be qualified by then.

She did the drills Yasha had prescribed, trying to be as strict with herself as he would have been. General Lukin sent her a brief note- just two dashed-off lines, but still more than mere trainees even dreamed of - telling her that Captain Kolchak had made his first check-in without incident, and that both he and Lukin himself sent their best wishes for her upcoming exams.

Natasha went into those exams knowing no one in her year was anywhere near as well-prepared; Lukin sent his congratulations before the results had been made known officially. Tasha tried not to worry that he hadn’t said anything about Yasha.

When two weeks turned into three, and Vigand’s gloating looks became too much to bear, Tasha steeled herself to pay Lukin another visit. This time, his aide was better prepared to deal with her. The general had said to tell Comrade Romanova that Captain Kolchak had yet to make contact, but she could expect to be informed when he was back in Moscow. The aide was not at liberty to offer any further details. Natasha nodded slowly, thanked him politely, and tried not to think about the last time Captain Kolchak had come back to Moscow after running into Maria Stevens.

The following week, headquarters were abuzz with the rumour that General Lukin had gone to Bucharest himself. Opinion was divided as to whether this was because the Winter Soldier had to be apprehended, rescued, or retrieved in a body bag, but no one doubted that Yasha Kolchak had run into trouble of  _some_  kind. Natasha told some people she knew no more than they did, threatened others into submission, and glared at everyone else so they'd know better than to come too close. She also gave up pretending she had any chance at all of sleeping in her own apartment and went back to his; to show that she loved him really, and wanted him back home right away, she even put everything she'd moved back where it had started out. When they finally got word that Lukin was heading back to Moscow with ‘all assets accounted for,’ Natasha had to take the afternoon off to collapse across Yasha’s sofa in breathless relief.

She had half expected him to be in a full-body cast the next time she saw him, but Captain Kolchak made his first appearance on home soil looking just the same as when he’d left, if desperately in need of a good night’s rest. Natasha had been allowed to meet him at the airfield, but by the time the various petty officials involved were convinced that she had the requisite clearance the captain had already disembarked and was striding towards them surrounded by admiring crewmen eager to hear about his exploits in "experimental aeronautics."

“Yasha! Yasha!”

He looked up as soon as she said his name. The airmen he had been talking to parted respectfully, and Captain Kolchak dropped his travelling gear in time to put his arms around Natasha as she slammed into him with enough force to wind a lesser man.

“I think you missed me, little wolf.”

He had spoken teasingly, setting her up to insist that she’d never even realised he had been away. Instead, Natasha nodded fervently into the crisp folds of her trainer’s jacket and leaned into his hand when he ran it over her hair and down her back as though he were soothing a child. She had no idea when she had started crying or why, let alone how to stop. The others had to be gawking, but Yasha made no effort to acknowledge anyone else.

“I don’t want you to spend your winters in the capital anymore; next year you’re going to Kemerovo if I have to leave you for more than eight hours. Which idiot am I going to have to challenge for your hand this time around?”

That did make Tasha laugh, though it was a high, halting affair. 

“I told you last year- it’s the smog.”

The captain’s laughter- surprised, affectionate, more spontaneous than they could sometimes afford to be in front of other people- was a balm to her sore nerves. Yasha seemed to know it, too, because he smiled and kissed both her cheeks and then her forehead even though the other men were still right there.

“I missed you too, you know.”

He let her cling to him for almost a full minute more; by the time they separated, the others had dispersed with the discretion of men who understood the value of a private reunion.

“Where have you been all this while? Are you really okay?”   

He’d been in Bucharest the whole time- Stevens had led him a merry chase, and it was in keeping up with her that he had somehow managed to take himself entirely off the grid for a couple of weeks. Tasha winced, thinking of Lukin’s unforgiving analysis the last time Yasha had paid the price for his preoccupation.

“Was Alexei very angry?”

Lukin had been very kind, Yasha reported: he had turned up, obviously worried, and told the exhausted captain that they were pulling him from the mission because the Americans seemed to have no idea what they were doing, and the Kremlin saw no reason to wear out their newly-recovered top agent in pursuit of a woman who wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Which was fair enough, Yasha thought, since he had a lot of skills that were not really being used on this long, long,  _long_ -term surveillance project.

“I hate that woman,” Natasha grumbled.

“The next time she tries to take you away from us, I don’t care how, I'm going to kill her myself.”

“That woman is a puzzle," Yasha said thoughtfully.

"She can be the deadliest thing on two legs, but this time- something just wasn’t right. Are these wild threats a way of reminding me that you’re field-certified now, Agent Romanova?”

The pleasure and pride in his voice almost set Natasha off again, but she was too excited to cry.

“Yes. Come look at my report. You'd better make sure you're the first to request my assistance.”

He didn’t say he would, but he did whistle through his teeth in appreciation of her scores, so Tasha thought she had a decent chance.

They began the new year in relative peace, but things felt different after Bucharest. Yasha himself was as attentive as ever, and certainly as unremittingly strict in training, but he got- distant, maybe, sometimes. He went drinking with the other instructors like he always had, but he'd never looked as openly triumphant as he had recently when the last of them hit the bartop, conceding defeat, and he was free to slam his shot glass down and get out of there. Lukin still tolerated more familiarity from his Captain Kolchak than anyone else dared to risk, too, but it didn't always feel as easy as it had before. Tasha thought it might have to do with the nightmares she was sure he hadn’t suffered from before, but he brushed her off with increasing irritation every time she tried to bring it up.

She made exactly one mistake- she'd seen the signs of oncoming drama in his half-concealed tremours and when he started attacking his eye like it had offended him again, and only hesitated a little bit before making the call. It had been the right decision, she was sure until Lukin turned up armed with fatherly concern and one of the syringes Tasha had learnt to pretend she had no idea existed. Yasha let his superior lead him away without protesting, but as he did he shot Natasha such a look of pure, wounded betrayal that she had to go home and sob repentant tears into sheets she hadn't slept on in weeks.

She didn't see her trainer for days, and began to wonder if Yasha had decided he wanted nothing to do with the kind of worthless woman who would spy on him for his superiors. When she took the stage with the Bolshoi for the last time, though, he was right there, front and centre instead of skulking like some gothic phantom. He winked when she caught his eye, and she was so surprised that she came close to falling on her face in the middle of what should have been a very graceful turn. After she had accepted congratulations and well-wishes which would have been much more meaningful if she hadn’t been terrified that Yasha would leave without her, she found him where he usually wound up, waiting for her by the stage door with those pink roses of his in hand.

"Let me tell you what I’ve decided, Agent Romanova. If you find a way to replace my best friend Leonid as my number two I'll build you that ice palace even though you're never going to be Sleeping Beauty. Sunflowers and all, I promise."

Natasha thought the only time she'd ever been more relieved must have been the day they'd heard for sure that he would make a full recovery the year before.

"It’s a deal. Roses would be all right too. I think those might be your specialty- these are so lovely, Yasha."

He grinned, she grinned, and Natasha took his arm like nothing had ever been wrong. She let him walk her home to his apartment rather than hers without comment, but almost burst into tears when she saw that he’d left what they had come to think of as her space in the flat entirely unchanged.

Things got much better after that. Yasha seemed to be sleeping normally, at least, and he openly relished the opportunity to "stretch other muscles" when Lukin took him off Stevens' tail so he could pursue a series of short-term tasks for a change of pace. Natasha found herself thriving under the attentions of a happier, healthier, Captain Kolchak and his renewed enthusiasm for fieldwork as a vocation, but of course such a situation could not last more than a few weeks.

They had just completed one of Yasha's crazy training programmes, the kind no one could keep up with except the girl he'd trained himself, and were still congratulating each other on a flawless run-through when Leonid Vigand appeared unannounced and unwanted at Yasha's elbow. 

“Kolchak! I ran into your American in Szeged. You never said she was such a looker, boy.”

Yasha, who Natasha would have bet money had never spoken to Vigand about Maria Stevens in his life, kept walking without acknowledging the other officer. Vigand pursued both his victim and his theme with unrelenting enthusiasm.

“No comment? Don’t you want to know how she’s doing? I would have bet my rifle you were hot for that whore.”

 _That_  was too much, Natasha decided. Maybe it was for the best that Vigand hadn’t seen Yasha in early June, deathly pale and sick with pain, but she couldn't let something so hideously  _wrong_  go uncorrected.

“You're mad. That bloody woman nearly-”

“That’s enough, Natalia.”

She fell silent at once. Captain Kolchak’s voice was like the wind in January, bitter with the kind of biting cold that got into your bones and never faded completely until it was spring.

“I would not expect you to understand how I work _.”_

“I understand that  _I_ risk life and limb to bring our general secrets, prisoners, weapons unlike any we have seen before, and all the while you- favoured son,  _precious boy_ \- spend months on end  _watching that woman_. Why? What does she even do? But then what Yashka wants, Alexei must deliver, no?”

Vigand’s leer would have made Wassily Karpov proud.

“Not that I blame you. I know what I would do with a woman like that- I'm sure it makes a change from being with this little girl of yours.”

Yasha was on his accuser in less time than it had taken Natasha to grasp all of Vigand's ugly implications. She knew better than most that the Winter Soldier was capable of speed and strength like she had never seen in another person, but it had never been so clear to her that Yasha consistently held back when they were training. Vigand had no chance to defend himself, let alone retaliate- he hardly had time to gasp for breath between the captain’s ruthless blows. Tasha hardly recognised her trainer- sweet, thoughtful Yasha was locked away behind a mask of deadly fury.

A wilting group of security officers hovered anxiously in the distance, most likely wishing they had taken any other job in the Soviet Union. Natasha took a step towards her trainer.

“Yasha, you’re going to kill him.”

His chest was heaving, his breathing ragged. She couldn't tell how much of it was from exertion and how much was this all-consuming rage.

“Maybe I want to.”

It wasn’t that Natasha didn’t see the appeal, but she couldn't let Captain Kolchak murder a high-ranking KGB officer right in front of a handful of witnesses. Re-education, her mind whispered, forced re-conditioning, work camp, indefinite internment. Rail track, salt mine, gulag. They would take him away, she knew, and she’d never be allowed find him. Tasha reached out; the captain flinched when she touched his shoulder but didn't turn on her.

“You don’t. He’s not worth what it would cost you.”

The room was silent except for Vigand’s damp gasping. After a pregnant moment, Yasha stood fluidly, letting his just-conscious opponent slump to the ground.

“You’re damn lucky I have  _this little girl_ to think of.”

He turned to the door and offered the cringing security team an apologetic look.

“I’m sorry about all this. You know how it is with stupid bastards who don’t know how to choose their battles.”

The team was petrified to a man. Yasha sighed.

“That wasn’t a threat. I’ll come quietly.”

Their gratitude was palpable.

“I’m coming too,” Tasha announced; no one disagreed. Her trainer obviously thought she deserved to know what happened, and none of the others wanted to be alone with him if they could help it.

Nearly an hour later, she was still staring at her feet as Aleksander Lukin continued to upbraid his defiant protégé. No one had seemed to know what to do with her at any stage, though Yasha had made it clear each time anyone seemed to doubt it that she had had nothing to do with the altercation except for her role in ending it, and by the time they were handed over to the harried-looking general, Lukin had waved her into his office with an expression somewhere between exasperation and relief that he wouldn’t have to deal with the belligerent captain on his own either.

“I appreciate that Leonid Vigand can be a bloody fool, but most of the time  _you_  know better than to let him bait you. How shall I explain why my _senior tactical advisor_  thought it would be  _strategic_ to put one of our highest-rated agents-" he broke off to glare when Yasha snorted disdainfully- “out of commission over a few petty insults?”

Captain Kolchak wasn’t even trying to look regretful. He would not be spoken to that way, he insisted, and though he could perhaps have shown more restraint he thought it  _had_ been strategic to articulate clearly how and why Vigand should think twice before repeating his mistake.

“He was asking for it. Men like that don’t learn anything without a good kick to back up every lesson.”

"It’s not your job to educate him,” Lukin snapped. “I know you know that, boy.”

Natasha watched Yasha set his jaw, quite likely thinking of Vigand calling him exactly that, and knew she had to get involved before he said something not even Lukin could excuse.

“He kept talking about that American woman,” she said softly. Both men glanced at her; Yasha raised one eyebrow, almost but not quite a warning look. Lukin seemed almost hopeful as he motioned for Natasha to go on.

“He made it sound like it’s Yasha who’s obsessed with her and not the other way around.”

The general’s tired expression grew calculating.

“You went at him like a dog in a butcher’s shop over Maria Stevens?”

Again, there was an undercurrent of something Natasha couldn’t place in their superior’s voice. Watching her trainer while she waited nervously for his response, she realised that one of Yasha's fists was tightly clenched. She thought of taking his hand before he tried to pulverise the right side of his own face with it, but Lukin would not appreciate such a display at what was for all intents and purposes a disciplinary hearing. She felt some of the tension bleed from her own shoulders when Yasha suddenly flexed his hand as if forcibly letting go of long-held anger.

“I’m sorry. You’re right- it sounds ridiculous when you put it that way.”

Lukin nodded sternly, but Tasha could see he was relieved that Yasha seemed to have decided to give him something to work with.

“It just  _grates_ , Alexei. He thinks he does all the real work while I spend my time freezing my extremities off in the dark for the fun of it.”

The captain shrugged, derisive but also quietly appealing.

“Maybe he _would_ have to go halfway across the world and stalk someone for six months before he could get laid, I don’t know. I just don’t appreciate being called a coward, a light-weight, a lecher  _and_  a cheat just for doing my damned job without minding everyone else's business.”

Tasha thought the captain was more surprised than she was when Lukin stood up, laughing, and reached out to ruffle Yasha’s hair as though he were a child who had done well at school.

“You’re a good boy, Yakov Kolchak, even if you create more paperwork than the administration of Hungary. All right, you niusance- I’ll make this go away if you promise that the next time you want to break someone’s spine for questioning your dedication you’ll choose one of Karpov’s men, or, better, one of your god-damned targets.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Yasha said drily, but when the two men shook hands Tasha was sure she saw true gratitude in her trainer’s face, and genuine affection in the general’s.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Lukin urged the captain. “You'll get back on that horse when the time is right, and we both know you’ll finish her when it comes down to it.”

Yasha growled low in his throat, but drew himself up to give the general a properly smart salute by way of accepting the implied dismissal. Lukin caught Natasha's eye on her way out; she returned his sober nod with a grateful smile.  

Vigand was back on his feet soon enough for Yasha to avoid reprimand from any higher authority than Lukin; the other marksman stayed well clear of them after his recovery. Yasha said Lukin must have warned him off, but Natasha thought it was more likely that Vigand just remembered his last encounter with Captain Kolchak and had no intention of encouraging a reprise.

As spring warmed into summer, Tasha was delighted to discover that Yasha Kolchak had been asked to deliver a public address on behalf of the bureau, and that she was to accompany him to the gala where it would take place. Her joy was compounded by General Lukin’s refusal to commute the captain’s sentence no matter what Yasha offered to do instead- it was an honour, Lukin said firmly, and hotheaded soldiers who made trouble on their own team should take the opportunities they were offered to show that they knew how to act like sensible members of society. Yasha acquiesced, though not with particularly good grace. The topic was to be military service, how Captain Kolchak had decided to join up, and why he thought every good Soviet boy should consider doing the same. Tasha laughed hysterically; Lukin, smiling sagely, poured more vodka and offered her a toast while the captain groaned into his hands.

About an hour before the big event, Tasha had just about shimmied into the dress she was determined to wear in spite of her date’s reservations about its length and fit when she heard the musical crash of glass hitting the ground. When that wasn't followed by one of the captain's sheepish announcements that all was well, even if she was sharing the quarters of a world-class fool, she thought she’d better check on him.

"Is everything alright?" 

It was not. Captain Kolchak stood in front of his desk, immaculate in his full-dress uniform except for the broken glass on the ground, his boots, and one already-bleeding hand. He didn't seem to have realised he was hurt- he was blinking at the mirror that was now in shards as if he wasn't sure what it was or why it had forsaken him.

“Sorry,” he muttered, his voice as distant as his eyes. 

“I was just- I didn’t-”

Tasha thought it was entirely possible that he had no idea where he was or who he was talking to.

“Stop. Yasha, stop. Oh god.”

She grabbed her trainer’s hand with both of hers before he could rub blood  _and glass_  into his poor beleaguered eye. She cursed herself for a careless, complacent idiot- she couldn’t explain how neither she nor Lukin had realised that this speech would cut way too close to those corners of Yasha’s life before the bureau that often led directly to headaches, disorientation, and those awful nightmares.

“You’re not well. Please, please, don’t touch your face just now. Will you be all right on your own? I have to get Aleks-”

“No! No. Tasha, please.”

His grip on her shoulders was bruising- she thought it matched the desperation in his eyes. He was terrified, Natasha realised- not nervous or reluctant, but really, deeply, scared.

“Okay. Of course. If that’s what you want.”

Yasha nodded so vigorously she thought it might be hurting him. Very slowly, Tasha raised her hands and pressed them carefully to his face. It was like putting blinkers on a frightened stallion, maybe- her only thought was to keep him still and centered. It probably shouldn’t have worked, but as they stood like that the captain’s shallow gasping evened into healthier-sounding breaths, and he let go of her with a low, unhappy sound of apology.

“I’m not hurt,” she assured him. “And you’re going to be fine. I won't say anything to anyone unless you want me to.”

“Thank you,” he whispered. Tasha, desperate to show him how much he did not have to look so  _alone_ , kissed his cheek before she took his hand again.

“We need to deal with this. Try to relax.”

Much calmer now that he was sure she wasn’t going to run for Aleksander, the captain let Tasha boss him around with the patience of a saint, or at least of someone who was used to the none-too-tender ministrations of army nurses. Getting all the glass out of his small cuts took longer than it should have because he hadn’t stopped shaking and because Tasha was both nervous of hurting him and increasingly afraid that he was seriously ill, but Yasha bore with it uncomplainingly.

“Thank you.”

“You can stop saying that. Are you sure you’re all right? They won’t _make_ you do it if you're sick.”

“I'll be fine,” he promised, sounding fairly certain. Tasha thought it was probably safe, and maybe even necessary, to push for details.

“Are you sure we can’t tell Aleksander? He’ll want to-”

She broke off when she felt him stiffen under her hands.

“It will be better for all of us if he never finds out. I really mean that, Tasha.”

He met her eyes steadily, and Tasha saw both hope and regret in the well-known gaze. He _must_  really mean it, she thought: he had been desperate to get out of the whole thing, but now that he had the perfect reason not to go he preferred to suffer through it in this state of semi-shock rather than let the general see that he wasn't fit for duty. She knew Yasha realised he was asking her to keep secrets from a superior, which was a risky business at best and a deadly game at worst, but he must have been aware that she would have done anything he asked.

“Has this happened before? Do you know what it is?”

He nodded, but shied away from meeting her eyes this time.

“I’m sorry, little wolf- I don’t think I should tell you yet. Not because I don’t trust you, you understand, but because-”

“Swear to me you’re not dying.”

Yasha looked very taken aback for a second, then smiled lopsidedly and put one arm around her.

“It’s not that kind of thing. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good. Now promise me you’ll say something if you’re in pain or in trouble or you need someone to come and see you don’t blind yourself smashing mirrors for no reason except to make us late for dinner.”

He hesitated for a second- Yasha Kolchak never gave his word if he wasn’t sure he could keep it- but eventually nodded slowly.

“Then I don't care when you tell me. I just want to know how to help you.”

Instead of saying anything, the captain pulled Natasha into a grateful hug. She watched sternly as he slid his gloves on over the bandages she had just secured but laughed when he held his hands up in mock-surrender so she could inspect them. 

"That's good," she decided graciously. "No one will be able to tell unless you cry when they shake your hand too hard."

"I wouldn’t last two minutes without you, Tashen’ka.”

“I know. Which is why you’re going to make sure I get to come out with you from now on, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

He met her startled pleasure with a warm look.

“You don’t really believe I'd have let you come to this thing if I hadn't already cleared it, do you? No matter what these idiots see- and I _don't_ mean your bare legs, wretched girl- they're not getting a look in while I have a say."

She flew at him, hugging him like she was afraid he'd disappear if she let go of him. 

"You're horrible," she complained; he laughed unrepentantly, and they set out arm in arm. They made it to the dinner punctually enough to avoid difficult questions, but Natasha pressed close to her date, keeping one hand at his waist as much as possible to stave off unwanted conversation. The looks they attracted ranged from irritated to envious to outright appreciative, but they made it through the evening without incident. When a smiling aide came to invite Captain Kolchak onstage, Tasha reached out to straighten his tie. 

"You'll be fine," she whispered, tilting her head as they had learnt to do so that it looked like they were kissing as long as her hair framed their faces just right.

"Smile for your public, Captain."

Yakov Kolchak took the stage with the presence of a man who knew he deserved the adulation he was sure to receive. From her spot near the stage, Natasha was well-placed to see the wide variety of officials congratulating Lukin left and right as his young favourite won hearts and minds with everything from his I-love-the-air-force bearing to his sorry-sweetheart-I’m-not-from-around-here accent. She was reasonably certain she was the only one who realised that Yasha kept his hands in his pockets to hide the way they were still trembling intermittently rather than because it was just the way things were done in Kemerovo.

Everyone from their own colleagues to some of the most important men in the Kremlin gathered round to offer their appreciation afterwards, and Yasha met them with a smile that only looked a little ragged at the edges. Tasha caught his hand before it wandered towards his face, and leaned in to whisper again.

“You’re doing so well. Just a little longer, all right?”

He nodded fractionally, visibly softening his knowing smirk into a concerned smile when she made a show of blinking rapidly and yawning widely so they could get out of there before anyone decided they should move on to some more intimate party where they’d have to talk to people for more than thirty seconds at a stretch. He made their apologies to Lukin so handsomely that Tasha caught the general watching her curiously as they left- if anyone was behaving erratically, he was probably thinking, it was not the poor, possibly brain-damaged apple of his eye.

Yasha dragged her into another crushing hug as soon as they were safely back in their (his) apartment.

“Natalia Romanova,” he murmured unsteadily, “I need you to know that you’re the one good thing about this hell.”

“I never wanted a brother,” she told him in a similar tone, “But now that I have one I’m very glad it’s you.”

“Good,” he murmured, releasing her and kneeling to deal with his boots.

“Now listen to your brother who loves you and put on some trousers, for god’s sake; I can’t look at you like this.”

It was the closest he had come all day to sounding like himself, so Natasha complied without question and only laughed a little at the sheer relief on his face when she returned in clothes that did not draw attention to her every curve. They spent the rest of the evening curled together on the sofa, Yasha trying valiantly to read while Natasha did her best to discover where they would be going on her first assignment, and when, and with whom.

“We’re going to Nepal,” he said at last, beyond exasperated with the way she’d all but climbed into his lap in an effort to get his attention. Natasha grinned in triumph, imitating the gesture Lukin used to mean ‘tell me more.’

“We leave this weekend, after dinner. It's a morale-raising kind of mission. We have to climb Mount Everest so we can change its name to Mount Lenin. If we have time we’re supposed to find a way to carve his face into the-”

“Shut up! Shut up, shut up, I hate you more than I hate split pea soup. I told you you were horrible! You’re a terrible person, Yasha Kolchak, and I’m going to find the shortest skirts in Moscow and wear them every day until I die, just to spite you.”

“You’re going to be bloody freezing by the time we get to base camp,” he warned her brightly, kissing her forehead before he left her for the night.

“This is exactly why I never wanted a brother,” Tasha complained to the empty room, but she went to sleep with a smile on her face for the first time in too long.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more angst, some anxiety, and Tasha finally sees the Winter Soldier. then she laughs in his face and he yells at her, but not for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look look some very beautiful things!
> 
> [Kells' Stephanie Barnes](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/art/Kells-Stephanie-Barnes-473508908) by [UchinanchuDuckie](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/) on [deviantART](http://www.deviantart.com)  
> [Kell's Barnes Fixed up](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/art/Kell-s-Barnes-Fixed-up-474255779) by [UchinanchuDuckie](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/) on [deviantART](http://www.deviantart.com)  
> [Kells' Steph Again](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/art/Kells-Steph-Again-475937054) by [UchinanchuDuckie](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/) on [deviantART](http://www.deviantart.com)  
> [Kells' Tony, Clint, and Natasha - Recolored](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/art/Kells-Tony-Clint-and-Natasha-Recolored-474687408) by [UchinanchuDuckie](http://uchinanchuduckie.deviantart.com/) on [deviantART](http://www.deviantart.com)  
> Please go tell this lovely UchinanchuDuckie how lovely they are and that she is a clever duck(ie) I have already told her repeatedly but perhaps she will believe me more if people back me up?

Their hard-won peace didn’t even last the night. It was still dark when Tasha realized that the strained coughing sound that had roused her was her mentor choking on a scream or a sob.

“Yasha? What's wrong?”

He made no effort to acknowledge her, but since he hadn’t locked the bedroom door Tasha decided she could defend the decision to check on him. Her breath caught at the sight of her hero shuddering with a kind of disoriented misery she’d never seen before.

“Yasha,” she tried again. This time he raised his head at the sound of her voice.

“I left her,” Yasha said distinctly, dejected and self-loathing in a way that made Tasha think of the show trials of the early 1960s. He wasn't begging for clemency, however: Captain Kolchak sounded quite ready to sentence himself to death or exile without any further ceremony.

“I promised I’d stay with her, and then _I left her_ out there on her own.”

The tear tracks on his cheeks were too much to bear. Tasha gave up entirely on both dignity and decorum and climbed into bed with her best friend.

“Listen to me. It wasn't your fault. How could it be?”

Yasha didn’t question his student’s right to throw her arms around him like it was her specific duty to hold him together. He didn’t respond immediately, though, remaining stiff in her arms until Tasha cupped his cheek with one hand to try and help him focus. It had worked the night before, she thought.

“It was just an accident, Yasha. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

He shook her off roughly, stiff with anger and something more than hurt.

“Don’t lie to me. You know damn well whose fault it was.”

His usually warm eyes were as cold and hard as steel. For the first time since they’d met Natasha felt very keenly aware that her trainer was stronger than her by enough to make things very dangerous if he chose. Before she could even think of defending herself, though, Yasha seemed to come to himself. He blinked rapidly, reached out unsteadily as if he might stroke Tasha’s cheek, and then collapsed backwards with a ragged gasp.

“I’m sorry. Tasha, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m-”

He cut himself off with another breath that could have been a sob. When he started speaking again it wasn’t in Russian anymore, but something soft and guttural which Natasha was sure she’d never heard before. It didn’t sound Slavic at all, but she was too busy worrying about her trainer to wonder why he hadn’t told her he spoke …something Uralic, she thought.

“It wasn’t you,” she said again, because even though she couldn’t follow what he was saying he hadn’t altered his tone at all.

“Yasha, you know she never would have blamed you.”  

She was pinned to the spot by the intensity of his gaze.

“’Course she doesn’t,” he said, suddenly speaking English.

“She won’t ever. I tell her once, twice, whenever I see her, but she never admits I was a damn fool to ever trust anyone but her. Shoulda stayed home and kept our goddamn heads down until the worst of it was over, is what.”

Tasha had known Captain Kolchak spoke English fluently- he had stacks of books, half of them illegal and most of them gifts from Lukin, in their common room. She had never heard him speak it aloud, though, and it was a shock to realise how completely the use of other languages transformed his voice.

“You’re so tired,” she protested, unwilling to pursue the question of when Yasha saw his wife to talk to her about how he could have prevented her death.

“You’ll see in the morning, it’s going get better.”

“It is,” he agreed, back to Russian now. His voice was too bright, brittle with a fragile kind of hope.

“It is, because one day we’re going to get out of here, and find her, and stay with her, and then it won’t be like this again.”

Natasha crushed her trainer close in an awkward, heart-felt hug.

“Not for a good long time, Yasha.”

“It’s alright,” he murmured indistinctly, hands closing around Tasha’s waist in a passable attempt to return her embrace.

“I wouldn’t just leave you, you know.”

He had said that before, she remembered, when he’d been half out of his mind from both pain and the painkillers they gave him that never seemed to have much effect.

“I know,” she told him, trying to show that she trusted him without accidentally agreeing to some kind of suicide pact.

“Please, Yasha, you should go back to sleep.”

“I should go back to New York,” he muttered, in English again, but then another full-body shudder distracted both of them.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t ask for your medication?”

He looked her right in the eye. There was pain there, more than anyone should have had to live with, and the grief that never really went away, but there was also a breathtaking clarity of purpose he’d only rarely let Tasha see before.

“No one needs what they’re offering, Tasha.”

She should have protested- he was closer to clinical insanity than any kind of competence to make his own decisions- but even as Natasha thought about picking up the phone she remembered Yasha’s face the last time Lukin had led him away, and knew she’d never go against his stated wishes.

“Alright. What do you need, then?”

He smiled at her then, small and sad but also breathtaking in its sincerity.

“I’m okay, Tashen’ka.”

He wasn’t, at all. Tasha nodded anyway, rocking him a little as she swayed.

“You will be, anyway.”

She didn’t realise she’d fallen asleep with her arms still around him until she was woken by an insistent rapping at their door.

“Yasha,” she muttered as she pulled her hair into a hasty bun.

“Yasha, it’s got to be Aleksander.”

He was so deep asleep, though, and God knew he needed it. If she pushed him, and he woke up screaming with Aleksander on the other side of the door, nothing she said would keep that syringe away.

Tasha answered the door with a bright, thoroughly fake smile and the offer of coffee she wasn’t sure they had. The Captain was still asleep, she reported as she rifled through their cabinets. Lukin glanced towards the captain’s room, and Natasha found herself wondering beyond any kind of logic if he’d be able to tell that Yasha hadn’t spent all night alone.

“I did not think the captain was given to sleeping in on his days off.”

He wasn’t, Tasha agreed, but they’d had a late, _late_ night celebrating a potential disaster successfully averted. Yasha _really_ had not wanted to make that speech.

The general narrowed his eyes.

“I was under the impression that you wanted an early night, Agent Romanova.”

There was a world of warning in the use of her title.

“I did, but Yasha was so pleased to be done with that dinner, you know how he is.”

“I do know how he is,” Lukin agreed in a voice that said without saying anything that he also knew Yasha Kolchak did not sleep past 11 unless something quite unusual was going on.

He stared Natasha down as if he were trying to see right into her soul. She drew on months spent standing still under bright stage lights, concentrating on her carriage and smiling like she couldn’t feel her make-up caking on her face, and met the general’s eyes calmly. 

“Alexei? What's my little wolf done to earn your fear-the-reach-of-the-Kremlin face? She’s been here since you last saw her, I’d swear it.”

Tasha and the general turned as one, and it was a lucky thing Lukin had had his back to Yasha’s door or there was no way he would have missed Natasha’s double take. Captain Kolchak was fully dressed in neatly pressed slacks and one of those crisp long-sleeved shirts that always seemed faintly out of date the way he wore them. He offered the general his hand in greeting, and Tasha saw that their handshake was as steady as her trainer’s voice. Lukin looked about as taken aback as Tasha thought he’d ever let anyone under his command see him.

“Kolchak. You look well.”

Yasha raised one eyebrow.

“Thank you, I think. It's not that surprising, is it? We saw you _yesterday,_ General.”

It would have been funny if Tasha’s heart were not still beating twice as fast as could possibly be healthy. Lukin nodded, smiling slightly.

“So you did. It was very well done, I must say.”

Captain Kolchak grinned his boyish grin and repeated some of the more extravagant compliments he had been paid in a lilting tone that was just shy of outwardly mocking people much too powerful to laugh at. This time the general did play along, pursing his lips and snorting derisively in all the right places.

“Like moths to a flame. One day there’ll be a place for you in politics, you mark my words.”

“God forbid,” Yasha said with feeling. Lukin laughed outright, clapping his protégé’s shoulder with marked fondness.

“And that is why I never worry about you in this den of wolves. Listen, boy: how would you feel about taking your new partner into the field in the coming week?”

It was a distraction, Natasha realized- Lukin had never, ever, turned up to give Yasha his orders at the apartment. Captain Kolchak chose not to comment, however, but accepted the assignment for both of them with his usual casual assurance.

“She’ll be spectacular,” he promised, and Lukin smiled again.

“I would expect no less from you, Yashka.”

They shook hands again, and the General was on his way without even glancing at the cup Natasha had set before him.

“Yasha, are you really all right?”

He was, he said quietly.

“Thanks to you, I think. Tasha, I’m so-“

“Please don’t apologise.”

She took both of his hands in hers, relishing his strong, steady grip.

“I just want to know you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” he said just like he had the night before.

"Has this really happened before?"

He nodded wearily. Tasha felt her throat close up at the thought of it, the more because he must have been on his own for the worst of it since he wouldn't say a word to Lukin and she'd had no idea it could get this bad. 

"Are you very sure there's nothing else we can do?" 

“Of course there is. I told you, didn't I? We're going to fix this. It might take a while, but one day.”

He did sound like he believed it. In the light of day, with that quiet confidence in his smile, it was much harder to worry that he meant to find that solution with a pistol in his mouth.

“And you’ll take me with you when you do.”

Yasha seemed surprised, almost alarmed, that she remembered him saying that. He ran his hand through his hair, leaving half of it standing on end, and offered her his best effort at a rakish grin considering he was much more tired than he’d dared to let on with Lukin on the alert.

“I’m taking you to Rotterdam, aren’t I?”

That was no kind of explanation, but it was true, and Tasha had been waiting months and months to show her trainer she could be what he needed in the field. She grinned.

“They’re not going to know how you got even better at your job.”

He was the only person she’d ever met, she thought, not for the first time, who could laugh at her in such an inoffensive way.

* * *

 Five days later they were in fact in Rotterdam, already in position on the roof of a warehouse containing a top-secret weapons stash, and the Winter Soldier was pale with exasperation as his student laughed so hard she had to cling to him to keep her footing.

“Tasha! It's not that bad!“

“No, I think it’s worse. I’m sorry! I’m sorry, it's just-”

Captain Kolchak yanked off his goggles so he could glare at his new partner, but Natasha was beyond speech.

“You sound like you've had too much morphine,” he grumbled.

“I hope you realise this is meant to be a _stealth_ operation.”

“I've never had morphine in my life," Tasha heaved, struggling to breathe normally, or at least quietly. 

"You look like a praying mantis. Do they at least do something useful?”

They did: the mantis-eyes were bullet-proof, eliminated glare even on fresh snow, and offered him the options of night and heat vision. The mask was effective against smoke, gas, and chemical attacks. As an added bonus, Yasha's gear also put the fear of god into anyone who saw the Winter Soldier looming over them, and together with the jacket had the effect of making the captain virtually invisible. Natasha scoffed at the last of these grand claims.

“I don’t believe anyone who sees this costume will ever forget you were there.”

But that was the point, the captain insisted with a grin Natasha could only see in the creasing around his eyes. With everyone around him combing the ground of the Winter Soldier in all his leather-and-steel glory, it was shockingly easy for Yasha Kolchak to swap his armoured jacket for a sports coat and walk right through security with his mask, jacket and gun tucked away in the kind of backpack that made him look like an errant hiker instead of a trained assassin. He didn’t do that often, he assured his student when she gaped at him, but having the option had got him out of a tight spot more than once.

"But it’s so…theatrical. Don’t you hate this sort of thing?"

He did, and they both knew it, but Yasha only shrugged.

"Alexei commands it; Captain Kolchak must obey. And it does work, even if it looks like fetish gear and does nothing at all to discourage that rumour."

Natasha smirked; the captain’s supposed fiancée was all too familiar with _that_ rumour.

"You have to admit it’sa lot of leather for the daytime. And he lets you call him Alexei, which no one else ever does. Plus he makes you dye your hair for no reason. Maybe he just likes his boys tall and very blonde?"

Yasha considered her hypothesis, then nodded gravely.

"That does seem like the only rational explanation for his continued interest in my esteemed colleague. All right, Agent Romanova: if you think you can pull yourself together enough to keep your grip on that rifle I’d like to finish this mission before we’re both old and grey.”

Tasha drew herself up, projecting the kind of calm dependability that went with the territory of covering her trainer as he went about his work.

“Of course, Captain.”

Suddenly, a thought that should really have struck Tasha sooner occurred to her.

"You don't think that woman's going to be here, do you?"

Yasha's answer was maddeningly nonchalant.

"Who knows, with the Americans? She does have a way of turning up."

"I'll stop her," Tasha vowed, meaning it with all her heart.

"If she so much as looks at you I'll put a bullet in her-"

"You will _not_."

The captain had stepped forward before Tasha realised he'd moved, and he grabbed her hands with more force than he used most of the time. 

"You leave well alone, do you understand? Don't go near her."

"I won't just-"

"No. You're going to do your job, Agent Romanova, so I can do mine. If you can't manage that you can stay in Moscow unless I need a secretary." 

Tasha already knew her trainer almost never said anything he didn't mean completely. She backtracked immediately, chastised and ashamed of her outburst even though she wasn't entirely sure what she'd said that he objected to so strongly. Yasha being Yasha, it was possible he just thought he should be the only one to take unconscionable risks.

"I'm sorry. I'll do what we came to do." 

He sighed, and she knew that if they were at home he'd be dragging his hand through his hair in frustration again. 

"I know you will, Tashen'ka." 

Yasha put both of his gloved hands on her shoulders, meeting her eyes. 

"She's not going to hurt either one of us. She might not even be here. Are you going to be all right on your own?"

"I'm fine," Natasha insisted, a hair's breath from defensive. Of course she could do what he'd spent nearly two years preparing her for. She wasn't the one who had strange mental breakdowns and impossible headaches and wouldn't talk seriously about a woman who kept trying to kill him.

"Are _you_?" 

He nodded reassuringly, holding out his hands obligingly so she could see for herself that they were as steady as they'd ever been, and waited for her reluctant answering nod before snapping his visor back into place.

“Stay out of trouble, all right? This shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

Tasha rolled her eyes to cover her anxiety.

“When am _I_ ever the one who gets us into trouble?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more chapter still to go! nearly nearly done then back to poor Loki I bet he thinks I've forgotten him : (


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the end! maybe this whole thing was to get to that last line, huh.

Tasha had to admit that there was very little of Yasha Kolchak on display when the Winter Soldier was in action. It didn’t even look like him, really- the mask and visor which had struck her as absurd were positively sinister now, the red-tinted lenses giving the Soldier’s eyes a hellish glow as they reflected the lamplight. Even more, the appearance of some 15 kilos of additional muscle mass- wholly comical while Tasha was watching her trainer shrug it on and off as casually as he might have changed his shirt- transformed the captain’s athletic frame into that of the kind of behemoth the KGB only wished they had in their employ.

Tasha would have liked to be more involved in her own first mission, but when she had said as much her trainer had observed sagely that brand new cadets did not take their first test flights in the Su-25s. Knowing that Yasha only laid on the Air Force chatter when he was done negotiating, Natasha had accepted his reasoning without further debate and promised herself that she’d do so well as a glorified security officer that he’d have to treat her more like a real partner the next time they went out together. 

With that in mind, she scanned the area in front of her with more than military diligence. Yasha had made it across the warehouse roof without difficulty; if everything went according to plan, he would only have to deal with a few guards and a supervisor or two before he had what he needed and they could be on their way. Natasha wasn’t even completely sure what it was they were after- all Lukin had told her specifically was that the Americans were scheduled to receive a class of projectile weapon the Kremlin was very keen to see. He hadn’t had to tell her he would never have wasted the Winter Soldier on a straightforward extraction job if he were not determined to encourage Yasha’s newfound commitment to the next generation. If that had been a warning- she knew Lukin remembered her conduct only days earlier- it had been much more subtle than Lukin usually was.

Tasha’s second sweep of the vicinity was the same as the first until a distant glimmer caught her eye. Craning forward, Tasha squinted at the far roof until she made out the lone figure of another solitary gunman.

Gunwoman.

Maria Stevens had made it to Rotterdam after all.

Tasha’s nails scraped against her trainer’s rifle as the weapon twitched in her hands. She was well out of range, however, and in any case she had given Yasha her word. Captain Kolchak would never tolerate her going against a direct order- which had also been a deeply personal request, in some ill-defined way- without a much better reason than “because she was there, and I hate her.”

Instead of leaving her post, then, Tasha plastered herself as close to the surface of the roof as she could get, staying below the parapet so that Stevens wouldn’t see her.

The same sudden noise distracted both women: the crash of metal on metal, and then the muffled thump of flesh on heavy flooring. Moments later, Yasha Kolchak and about six other people spilled out of the roof's emergency exit. The unexpected ambush didn't seem to phase him- the captain took down two people in a single move, and was facing off against another three by the time Tasha had lined up her best shot.

She was left blinking in confusion as two of the three men attacking Captain Kolchak dropped before she ever touched the trigger. Stevens, apparently, was so intent on getting her man that she didn’t care who she had to go through to get to him. Tasha's reckless shot in the American's direction- meant as warning, distraction, anything that would buy her trainer time to get away- proved immaterial. The deciding factor in the rooftop melee proved to be the man standing behind Captain Kolchak with a lighter in his hand.

Yasha whirled on the last man just as he dropped it. A glistening trail of kerosene turned into an impassable gulf of flame between the two men and the path back over the rooftops to Tasha. Much worse than that, it also trailed away into the factory below them.

Her trainer was standing on a five-storey arms store that was on the verge of turning into an inferno, and Tasha had no idea how to help him. The man who had got them into that position was already dead, the latest victim of Maria Stevens' unwavering commitment to her job.

Her trainer glanced towards Tasha, weighing his options, then seemed to shrug before he turned the other way. Tasha's heart was in her mouth even before she realised what Yasha was planning.

“Holy god,” Tasha whispered as he jumped right off the ledge. Anyone who wasn’t the Winter Soldier would probably have been killed in the attempt, but from where she was she had no way to know how it had ended for him. Better than if he had stayed where he was, in any case- not three seconds later the roof began to collapse. By the time Tasha remembered Maria Stevens, the American was nowhere to be seen. She scrambled to her feet, knowing Stevens must have gone after Captain Kolchak and determined not to let her finish _that_ mission.

Deeply thankful for two years’ training with a man who didn’t seem to know what fatigue was as a concept, Tasha gave chase with strength she hadn't known she had. She took the stairs too many at a time and praying that Yasha had found safety instead of broken femurs in that crazy jump. Her lungs were burning by the time she reached the ground, but she only had to think of that woman and her pistols to find new stamina.  

She rounded the last corner to find her trainer on his back with Maria Stevens already kneeling over him, her knees digging into his chest as she stopped him from struggling up.

“Stay down, for god’s sake. Don’t you dare move.”

He must have been stunned by the fall- at his normal speed he should have been able to fling the woman off long before she could have drawn her gun. Tasha edged to her left, hoping that would provide an angle from which she could be sure she wouldn’t shoot her trainer along with his attacker. To her horror, Maria Stevens’ next move was not to taunt or make demands but to unmask the Winter Soldier in a single quick movement that took less time than Tasha would have needed to find his visor’s hidden clasp. The American was leaning over her victim again before his protective gear so much as hit the floor.

Tasha’s next sideways step- more urgent, but still cautious- revealed another shock: Agent Stevens didn't have a gun on Yasha at all. Instead, she seemed to be running through the diagnostic Tasha had been taught to use for suspected cervical-spinal injury. 

"That's good. I can't see anything when you're in this stupid jacket. Roll your shoulders for me?" 

He did, smiling faintly when the American nodded with satisfaction. Tasha wondered if he might be concussed- but even as she did Stevens waved her hand across Yasha's line of vision, watching his eyes track her movements as though checking for the same.

"Yeah, you're fine. God alone knows how you didn’t crack your skull- we’re going to light so many candles for Dr. Scherer this weekend. That was forty feet at least, you maniac."

"Better'n getting blown up, I thought."

Tasha had realized the first time she heard her trainer speaking English that he sounded like a different person entirely in that language, but she’d had no way to know that the person he sounded like in particular was his own supposed nemesis.

"Not if you still end up in bits," the American grumbled, rocking back onto her heels so that she wasn't pressing Yasha into the ground anymore. She helped him sit up gingerly, snapping at him in exasperation when he moved too quickly. The way the woman cradled Tasha's trainer's face in her hands didn't look like any medical test she had ever seen. Maria Stevens frowned as her thumbs brushed the dark shadows under the captain’s eyes. Her voice was warm and sympathetic.

"You're still not sleeping right, huh. It's been about a week?"

"Started Saturday," Yasha nodded.

He had braved that gala within an hour of trying to claw his own eyes out to keep General Lukin in the dark about this mysterious condition he wouldn’t even name, but the American knew how long Yasha had been sick just by looking at him. It had taken him more than a year to stop looking vaguely guilty about letting Tasha hug him when he wasn't sick or hurt, but when Maria Stevens _caressed his face_ the captain just sighed and leaned into her hands as though he’d forgotten how much he missed them.

Tasha wondered whether _she_ might be the one who'd fallen and hit her head. That question only grew more pressing when the woman who had almost killed her trainer let her hands drag slowly through the captain's hair, easing him forward until their foreheads touched. 

"What'm I gonna do with you, huh? Bucky, _Bucky,_ there are way too many people tryin’a break your neck without you doin’ it for them."

Instead of answering, Yasha raised the hand that wasn’t already at the American’s waist and tilted her head gently so he could cover her mouth with his.

The gun in Tasha’s hands clattered to the ground.

The couple were on their feet in no time, Stevens armed before she was even standing. Yasha touched her elbow without taking his eyes off his student.

“Easy. It’s just my volchok.”

The American lowered her weapon at once, but didn’t move out of her fighting stance. Natasha, wrong-footed and out of her depth on more levels than she could keep track of, reached uncertainly for the knife at her belt. There didn’t seem to be much point- she’d never be able to use it on her trainer, and experience said that even without an accomplice with a gun he’d have her on the ground in less than three minutes if she tried. Someone sobbed quietly; it took Tasha a moment to realise it could only have been herself.

They froze like that, the two living women in Captain Kolchak's life glaring at each other- one coldly defiant, the other already in tears- while he stood between them with a look in his eyes that was nearer to sadness than shame. His hand rested on Maria's hip, at least as intimate as that terrible kiss, but his eyes were locked on Tasha's. When Yasha spoke, it wasn’t in that hopelessly American English anymore but in the slightly too-formal, mildly provincial Russian he always used at home.

“It's all right. Tashen'ka, you know I'd never let anyone hurt you.”

She knew it like she knew her own name, Tasha wanted to say, but until five minutes earlier she would also have said she knew that Yasha Kolchak would cut his own arm off with his throwing knife before he kissed _Maria Stevens_ with the casual propriety of a long-time lover.

Her trainer looked very sad.

“I promise I had a much better plan for how I was going to tell you about this.”

Tasha nodded, desperate to believe him. At least he’d meant to tell her. He might be working with the Americans, but she was almost completely sure he wouldn't kill her in cold blood. Even if he'd completely lost his senses and was planning some kind of defection-

_I wouldn’t just leave you on your own, sweetheart._

He'd said that _months_ ago.

Tasha continued to stare blankly, wondering how much of what she’d thought she knew had been pure fiction. Yasha, presumably reading betrayal, hurt and total bewilderment in her expression, ran his hand through his hair the way he did when he thought one of his superiors was making a hash of things but didn’t know how to intervene.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I know this must look like madness.”

She nodded again because it really, really did. His lips quirked up, but he never said a word. He was going to let her talk, she realized, or ask, or scream, or cry. It was just Yasha’s way, apparently- even this mad Yasha who looked at the woman who had almost killed him as if she were everything good in the world.

Natasha opened her mouth to demand- too many things. What the hell her trainer was doing letting that American touch him after everything she’d done. How he could betray his beloved Anya in so base a way. Whether he’d been lying to Tasha from the beginning, and why he’d ever got involved with her if he’d always meant to leave. How, if he chose to answer in the first place, she could possibly believe anything that came out of his mouth when he was obviously out of his mind.

Both Captain Kolchak and Agent Stevens were still and silent, waiting for her to speak.

 The question that made it to Tasha’s lips was none of the ones she had thought most pressing- unless it was all of them at once.

“Yasha, who the hell is _Bucky_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay clearly there are at least five people reading this! that has been lovely for me so to all of you I say thank you <3 <3 <3 it has been good to work out some of the Soviet backstory that will inform everything in the S&J take on Siúil, a Rún.

**Author's Note:**

> I think my Russians are extra nasty because in addition to giving him upsetting test pilot backstory they have also picked his last name for Aleksander Kolchak, who was a captain in the Russian navy during the First World War, and also a _polar explorer_ , get it, get it, see what they did there? Nasty people.
> 
> title is for another depressed Irish song, which I find so relevant to this general sense of pining for lost Stephs that I figure I should just show it to you instead of copying 2/3 of the lyrics here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl3Ce3XJSD8&feature=youtu.be


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